Challenge to Hospitality: The ID Check in the Lobby

DON'T try any funny business at the Alex Hotel in Manhattan, Karen Kelly, because they've got your number, sister.

It is 1507. That is the number the desk clerk jotted on the photocopy the hotel made of Ms. Kelly's passport. Ms. Kelly had to produce the passport one night last week when she came into the lobby of the hotel, which is at 205 East 45th Street, to meet an out-of-town business associate.

"My husband and I travel a lot, but that was the most bizarre experience I've ever had in a hotel lobby," said Ms. Kelly, a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

"I'm one of those New Yorkers who doesn't have a driver's license, so I carry my passport with me in case I do need to show a picture ID."

But because she was not checking into the hotel and not going anywhere but the lobby, she did not count on having to produce a government-issued photo ID just to have a clerk phone a guest room from the front desk.

"I was kind of dumbfounded," she said. She handed her passport to the clerk, who made the photocopy and jotted on it the file number, 1507, and the time and date. The clerk told her the copy would be "kept on file for a year," said Ms. Kelly, adding: "At that point, I was kind of irritated at myself. I mean, a hotel lobby is, like, a public place, right? They claim the right to demand ID just to come in?"

That's right, said Mary Lou Pollack, the general manager of the hotel, where a standard single room can cost $475 a night. In fact, she had no apologies at all about the security drill.

"It very difficult to secure a hotel," she said in an interview in a bar just off the lobby of the two-year-old hotel. "We do a lot of high-profile business. We're two blocks from the United Nations and we always have guests who could be targets, which also would make the hotel a target."

The vigilant front-desk scrutiny is not just because of fear of terrorists, she said.

"When we were new, I didn't want this hotel to be sucker punched and to get a bad reputation." At night, she said, nearby Lexington Avenue "is overrun with prostitutes."

"While we were gaining our basic reputation, a lot of our accounts were from very conservative corporations. I was afraid in our early stages that a bad element would take over the hotel," she added. So, she said, "we made the hotel as obviously unfriendly as possible to people who wanted to have no identity."

I dropped by the hotel unannounced, so the public relations squad was not on guard. Since I was inquiring about a reader's complaint, I expected the brush-off. Instead, Ms. Pollack answered my questions directly and spoke passionately about her determination to run a luxury hotel while maintaining security.

Incidentally, before I identified myself, I sat undisturbed for 10 minutes in the lobby. No one asked me for a photo ID. Granted, it was midafternoon and I am a middle-aged male.

I'm just saying, is all .

This business of increasingly having to show your papers in this country is a can of worms for travelers, and we will return to it here on occasion, especially with regard to the delicate balances between security and privacy.

Let's leave the hotel on the East Side and go to the other extreme, philosophically and geographically. Let me introduce you to John Gilmore, a philanthropist who made his fortune as one of the first employees at Sun Microsystems. I spoke with him last month at a coffee shop near his home in San Francisco.

Mr. Gilmore has literally made a federal case out of his refusal to show identification, even to get on a plane.

As a consequence, he has not flown domestically since July 4, 2002, when he was stopped from boarding a flight after declining to show an ID.

"I'm simply not willing to show a passport or an ID to travel in my own country," he said.

Mr. Gilmore has filed a lawsuit against the federal government arguing basically that travel is integral to the right to assembly and that demanding identification from an airline passenger who has been adequately screened for weapons is unconstitutional.

As I said, we will return to this. Meanwhile, the court papers and other background on the case are at www.papersplease.org/gilmore.